Super Glaciers Leave Their Mark on the Gondwanan Supercontinent

Boulder, CO, USA – This new Special Paper from The Geological Society of America comprises a wide range of topics related to one of the most extreme paleoclimatic episodes in Earth’s history, the Late Paleozoic Ice Age (LPIA). With over 100 illustrations, chapters paint a broad swath across Gondwana while focusing on specific topics related to the effects of LPIA glaciation and deglaciation-triggered sea-level rise on the supercontinent.

The book’s objective, say editors Oscar R. López-Gamundí of Hess Corporation and Luis A. Buatois of the University of Saskatchewan, is “not to give a state-of-the-art review of the Late Paleozoic Ice Age,” which has been done with competency elsewhere, but, rather, to turn the reader’s attention toward facets of the LPIA that require further study.

Topics include the sedimentologic, paleoenvironmental, and paleoclimatic aspects of the glacial event; the influence of postglacial transgressions on the salinity of coastlines; the nature of glacial and glacially influenced ecosystems, with a look at the faunas (including the Levipustula Fauna) and floras of the time; analysis and illustration of trace fossil assemblies; and discussion of relatively less well-known glacial deposits in some Gondwanan regions. One chapter even challenges the popular interpretation that there was a single massive ice sheet over much of Gondwana during the late Paleozoic glaciation.